I've been meaning to write a bit about my experience purchasing and driving a plugin hybrid electric vehicle, as I haven't seen a lot of people discuss this. Ultimately, I was impressed with how much we were able to cut down on our carbon footprint, and how much money we've saved in fuel costs over the past couple of years.
Range Anxiety On The Prairies
Living in Saskatchewan, long drives are simply a fact of life. The nearest IKEA is 5 hours away, and people here think nothing of driving 3 hours to a football game, and then 3 hours back when it's over. Or commuting 100 kms each way into the city to go to their university classes.
As we were replacing our 14-year old Impreza on its last legs, I was very keen on going Electric. However, I couldn't get past the fact that charging infrastructure along Canada's prairie provinces is spotty at best. Supposedly it's decent on the Trans-Canada Highway, but we don't live anywhere that.
The next best thing would be to look at a Plug In Hybrid. These were few and far between, but we managed to find a Hyundai Tucson PHEV, and brought it home.
Home Charging
The car comes with a cable that looks and functions very similarly to a laptop's charging cable; It plugs in to any standard wall outlet at one end, and into the vehicle at the other. The Tucson has a J1772 port on the right hand side, which is relatively common at most charging stations (except Tesla ones).
The cable contains a power brick, just like most laptop chargers. The difference is, you can adjust how much amperage the car will charge itself at. You can choose from 0.6A, 0.8A, 1.0A and 1.2A.
The process couldn't be simpler; every time we get home from school, we pop the charging cable in.
City-Driving Mileage FTW
The Tucson has a 14kW battery, which is good for about 50km from full. (Technically it could be more, but the car will only drive in battery-only mode until the battery is at about 20%, then it forces you to use Hybrid mode). 50km is usually more than enough to do all the errands that our family needs to do, including drives to school and back (only 2km), and ferrying our kids to various activites.
In fact, for the first couple of weeks of driving the car, we didn't use any gas at all. Tickled by this, we started to rely on the Tucson more for daily commutes and errands. It effectively replaced our 2012 Toyota Sienna as the "Family Car", much to the chagrin of the kids, who don't do super well squished into the back seat.
Back Of The Napkin Mileage Math
Before the Tucson, we would fill each of our vehicles up about once every 1.5 weeks. The Sienna has a roughly 75L gas tank, while our Subaru Impreza's is about 60L.
With gas somewhere between 1.25c/L and 1.40c/L, that meant we were spending about $65-$80 on the Impreza, and $80-$100 on on the Sienna every time we filled up.
$145-$180 every tank, and to be conservative, I'll say we filled each car twice a month, every two weeks. So, every month, we were spending between $290-360 on fuel for our vehicles.
Both the Impreza and the Sienna are older, so their mileage wasn't as good as it used to be. I think the Impreza got around 13L/100k, and the Sienna is a bit worse, at 14L/100k or so.
The Tucson - being a newer car - gives us a lot more data about fuel consumption. We can see the average lifetime of the car, the mileage since the last fill-up, and the mileage since the car was turned on (this trip only) My wife and I started to play a game, where we tried to lower the average as much as possible by only relying on the battery. What we found was that for the most part, we were able to drive the car around the city, charge overnight, and just keep going on battery the next day.
In the first couple of months, we went from filling up two cards twice a month, to not filling up a car at all. I know that seems odd, because the Sienna is a bit of a gas guzzler, but since we started using the Tucson for most everything, the Sienna just didn't go through the tank as quickly.
Electricity costs about 0.16c/kWh here. So every time I charge the battery to full, I'm spending ((14kWh 80%) $0.16) = $1.8. I typically got about 450km/tank in the gas cars, so we're looking at (450km / (50km80%) $1.8/) = $20.25 for the equivalent distance.
This almost feels like I've made a mistake, but I think it's in the right ballpark; I'd gone from spending close to $300/month in gas, to roughly $40 in electricity to drive the same distance.
This was the real insight for me - Having a PHEV means that for city driving, you can DRASTICALLY reduce the amount of fuel you have to buy, even if you aren't switching out for Battery Electric Vehicles completely.
YMMV - Privilege Helps
There are a few things that make this work well for me, and that might change the equation somewhat for others:
- Easy Home Charging: We live in a house with a driveway, and easy access to a charger. If I were in an apartment, or had to use street parking, this would likely be much more complicated to manage.
- Cenral Location, Small City: I live near to the middle of our (small) city, which allows me to get anywhere in the city with a minimal amount of driving. I used to live in an outlying suburb, and I know that the overall travel distance from there is considerably longer. Being able to go all over the city one one battery charge lets me maximize the utility of the battery.
- Cheap Electricity: I pay about $0.16/kWh, which I think is pretty reasonable. There's no off peak rate, so I don't have to think about when to charge. I just pop the charger on to the car every time I get home.
- Cheaper Electricity (Free, even): We have a solar power array on our roof, which generally covers all electricty usage in the Summer months (including car charging).
It Could Be Even Better
There are some caveats that I should mention, that lower my savings pretty substantially. Unfortunately, some of them can't be helped!
- As mentioned previously, I live in Saskatchewan, so long drives are occasionally necessary. We often have to take our kid to dance competitions in other cities, and a 600km drive - even on hybrid mode - wrecks the math. The Tucson gets about 8.3L/100km on the highway, as it reverts to hybrid mode when the battery is drained enough.
- Saskatchewan winters are cold; VERY cold. The pure-EV mode scenario described above works from about March - October, but outside of those months, the car runs mostly in hybrid mode. This is due to the fact that Hyundai declined to put a heat pump in the car; There is no way for it to generate heat, other than with the engine. As soon as we turn the environmental controls on, the gas engine always kicks in. This is pretty disappointing, as I would love to use battery-only in the Winter. In fact I would, except when I get into the car and start breathing, the front windshield fogs up immediately, making warming basically essential.
- (The car CAN run AC on battery-only, which makes sense; An air conditioner uses the same principle as a heat pump, so is less energy-intensive).
- The Tucson still needs gas! It only has a 40L tank though, so it's MUCH cheaper to fill than either the Impreza before it, or the Sienna.
- I don't see much battery degredation in Winter, in terms of distance travelled on battery-only. Maybe 1-2km less in Winter?
Could this be done with a Hybrid car?
I think not, no.
We considered just buying a hybrid, and not going for the plug-in version. I think if we'd done that, this post wouldn't exist, and there certainly wouldn't have been as much of a revelation for me.
The main reason this whole thing works so well is that I can keep topping the car up at home every evening, so I can continually stay on pure battery power for months on end.
At one point this Summer, we realised that the car was about to cross a threshold for distance travelled since the last fill up: It crossed 2000km. To put that into perspective, the car at that point had 20,000km total on the odometer. Using the plug-in charging apparatus at home allowed us to use one tank of gas for 10% of the overall life of the vehicle! In my view, that is astonishing.
This would have been basically impossible with a regular hybrid. The Hybrid version of the Tucson has a 1.5kWh battery, which really won't get you very far. You would HAVE to use the gas engine for both city and highway driving. The Plugin version might allow you to use battery-only for quite a bit more time.
Do I need a Level 2 charger?
Need? Perhaps not. Want? Definitely. Currently, the level 1 charging cable included with the car allows you to go from 20% - 100% in about 10-13 hours. That's an overnight charge for sure, and if I forget to plug in the car, I'm definitely going to be wasting fuel the next day.
I should be able to get a Level 2 charger installed for a few hundred bucks, but we haven't decided to do that yet. It would be a nice convenience, to be able to go from 20-80% in roughly 2 hours.
But I don't think it's required at the moment.
Final Thoughts
I'm more than happy with the switch to a PlugIn Hybrid vehicle. The benefits to our pocketbook went so much farther than I expected! Of course, the unique aspects of our life does a lot to maximise the benefits we derive, but those benefits MORE than make up for the structural shortcomings (like Winter).
My next steps are probably get that Level 2 charger purchased, and once the Sienna finally kicks the bucket (which could take a few years, due to Toyota's pesky reliability), I will defnitely push for full-electric - hoping against hope that Saskatchewan's highways have better charging infrastructure by then.